A follow-up to a recent post I made regarding our Lotus Notes to Office365 email migration (Domino --> Hosted Exchange).

Apparently we had some users that were well versed in Outlook mail from other companies that have revived read receipts. Now the read receipt contagion has spread throughout our organization. Not trying to be a BOFH or anything, but really? Read receipts?

Have we as a society not developed past the point where we have to cover our arses with a notification of whether or not someone opened our mail?

Read receipts are like putting your letter in the mailbox and then stalking the mailman across the country to your great auntie's house and waiting for her like a creeper until she emerges in her moo-moo to retrieve your letter and then waiting for her to open and read said letter just so that you can feel satisfied that the information you relayed made it physically to her eyes whether she read it and gave a crap about it or not.

We only have one person in our organisation who uses read receipts, but that's one person too many. If she's sending me an e-mail about some innocuous nonsense, I hardly think she needs verification that I've read her vapid drivel.

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I rarely use them. When I'm trying to get in contact with someone and when they don't answer both emails and voicemails, then I request a read receipt. I'd rather not get flack on something not getting done because I can't get answers back. It works out well since I think most people just use the default option to send one so they never see the prompt again.

I'm going to find a way to globally disable read receipts even if I have to -- shiver -- use PowerShell to do it.

Our IT director says that if I can cause the computer to deliver an electric shock to the user when they request a read receipt to go ahead and work that into the budget and begin retrofitting office chairs.

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I do use 'm occassionally... Don't Always get them back, but when I do use 'm I tend to want to really know if the mail made it to the recipient and was seen. That's still only in 1% of the mail I sent. 99% is without.

But I completely agree. I am on record that I am against it as a CYA when the Office Manager thought it would be a great idea... It is a total waste of time, bandwidth, email box management, just all around a total pain in the ass.

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I am guilty of using read receipts. WAIT! Hear me out! I used to have a boss that we'd joke the only way to get him to be aware of an on-going issue was to email him, fax him, leave him a voice mail, send out some smoke signals and then you'd still have to walk into his office and click on the e-mail and point his head at it (actually did that once).

So many times we'd be in a meeting and he'd say, "I had no idea this was going on! Why didn't you tell me?" Response: "I sent you an e-mail!" His answer was that we had to try better than that to make him aware. The answer was a read receipt. If we didn't get one then we'd start building the fire to send out the smoke signals.

I have just set the options to never return read receipts. Never get prompted, never send one out. Had a few people do this that I exchanged emails with frequently. I don't need to send conformation of when I read your email. It isn't that important.

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I have to use them on our staff because half of the time, they never open my e-mail and read them. Case in point, we had an issue with an e-mail that was going around with a link to dropbox, but when they opened it, it looked like a piss-poor Google login screen. Sure enough, a user clicked on it and had her account compromised. I reset the password and sent word to her that it needed to be changed.

Yeah, I generally don't return them. But, I have used them at certain points in the past. I found it useful when sending out important information and I know plenty of people don't pay attention to the email. I keep the return receipts in a folder so when they say they never got it I can say well it shows you read it on this date, and with some of the people they deleted it without opening it on this date.

Some people like to request a return receipt all the time which baffles me, but I do find them useful from time to time. So to answer your question, no we as a society have no moved past needing to CYA as to whether someone read the email or not. I wish it wasn't needed but I won't take the fall for other people's slackatude.

I've had a few conversations with users about how useless read-receipts are. People will ask about it, saying that they sent an email with a read-receipt, to a user at another company, but they never received confirmation that the person opened it. They were about to jump down someone's throat about not reading their emails. I had to explain that the remote server may not relay read-receipts, or that the user may have their client set to not send them, or they may have just clicked no on the box that pops up asking if they want to send a read-receipt.

I think this issue follows along with something someone once told me about companies in general.

A company gets as much union as it deserves.

In other words, if there wasn't a reason, it wouldn't be done, regardless of how idiotic the reason may be... I, too, go out of my way to ensure that none of these receipts ever get sent from mail delivered to me.

I used them at my previous job because we had folks that would get messages, click on them (whether or not they read them is up for grabs), and then later say they never received a message on whatever important item was communicated to them. Unfortunately, management often sided with them. Fortunately for me, most people had Exchange setup to automatically send read receipts. I had something I could send to management to show that I did send it, they got it, and they at the very least clicked on it.

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I agree with Robert. However; when (and this is very rarely) I send something out that we deem needs to be read I do turn it on so that later I can say yes you did or no you didn't read that very important email from IT.

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When you send an e-mail to your team and that a few weeks down the road everyone is telling you they didn't know about the e-mail, you start to use them for important communications. When they then say "I didn't know about it", you can confront them with the read receipt with their name on it

However, I do agree that it gets on my nerves when someone uses them ALL the time. Once in a while means that there's a need for a "paper trail" for a specific project...